Mistral AI is a French LLM company founded 2023 (founding team from Meta / DeepMind), became a unicorn in three months. Hailed as "European OpenAI" — actively supported by EU government as core to European AI sovereignty strategy. Product line: (1) Mistral 7B (open-sourced 2023, once best small open model); (2) Mixtral 8x7B and Mixtral 8x22B (mixture-of-experts open models, performance near GPT-3.5); (3) Mistral Large (flagship closed model, quality approaching but below GPT-4); (4) Codestral (code generation specialist); (5) Mistral NeMo (open-source 12B model partnered with NVIDIA). API is practical and modern — function calling, JSON mode, streaming all supported. European enterprises prefer Mistral because datacenters are in EU (GDPR-friendly). Less used by Chinese customers; mainly European market.